This felt like a bunch of his earlier films smashed together, which forced him to simplify ideas he's covered elsewhere and made it difficult to tie all the various threads and storylines together. His takes on Putin, Syria and the US election were both especially shallow, and many of the connections he draws with his central thesis seem tenuous. For instance, Russia's military action in Syria isn't incomprehensible or a part of some elaborate psyop, a more independent Middle East is just more conducive to Russia ambition than one divided and under the thumb of America. It's odd that he misses this when early on he brings up Henry Kissinger's attempts to hamper any attempts to for the Arab world to coalesce into a coalition capable of disturbing the balance of power between the Americans and Soviets, exactly the balance of power Putin wants to offset. I wonder if this was an intentional omission to avoid portraying Putin in a "positive" light or just a honest oversight.
For all its flaws I still really enjoyed "HyerNormalisation", Adam Curt's aesthetic always does a good job of capturing 20th and 21th century's alienating atmosphere.
Taken purely as the work of an auteur (although it's a label I believe Curtis has rejected), the film was good. Aesthetic and certainly not boring at any point... In the end, I do agree with most of the critique here – his approach to the more "current" topics left a bit to be desired. Yet, I think he did end up with some substance on that note, just in a rather underhanded, subliminal way with the sequence in the final 5 minutes.
Finally finished it.
Curtis remains the most interesting documentary film-maker around; his choice of archive, editing and music is superb. His selection of subjects is eclectic and often insightful. But his insistence on telling a story rather than making an argument - and in particular his refusal to offer an alternative to what he criticises - mean that it's more thought-provoking than convincing. His tendency to pick a range of topics that interest him and then try to tie them together in one all encompassing story also remains a double-edged sword; when he finds missed or hidden connections it is fascinating but too often it feels tenuous and forced. But then again this is the point of Curtis - to provoke, not preach.
I always find it useful to keep in mind that his prejudices match his life story: a longing for the political certainties of his father's generation, nostalgia for the revolutions of his youth and criticism of subsequent changes (in particular the Reagan/Thatcher technocracy and fake individualism of the 1980s on).
Others have written good reviews so here are a few extra notes:
His romanticism lets him down - he really believes the journalist is a fearless truth-seeker and teller. No surprise - he came of age in the afterglow of "All the President's Men" - but it means he misses how journalism has changed over time. In particular, the journalists are now just as trapped as the readers in the new insular networks; one of the curiosities of Twitter is being able to see the networks of information journalists follow, which often show how little they expose themselves to contradictory views. Clickbait with its ability to measure the popularity of content also encourages the use of news as a product rather than as information; we're already seeing editors turning newspapers into semi-automated clickbait factories with junior (cheap) hacks as glorified Mechanical Turks who write stories based on PR releases and what the metrics say the audience wants.
He can't process that Brexit and Putin are a counter-force to the nightmare he describes because they come from the right. It's true that Surkov has created "managed reality" for Putin - but Putin also ended the economic chaos, won victory in Chechnya and re-established Russia as a global power. These are just the sort of tangible political achievements Curtis claims to want. But most importantly Putin offers Russians the twin certainties of God and Nation (and means it). Contrast this to the managerial bugman philosophies of the Western technocrats and their shifting "current year" morality (Obama moves in less than a decade from opposing homosexual marriage to imposing it).
He (rightly) attacks the West for imposing its own simple ideological narrative on the Middle East - but then does precisely what he accuses others of in simplifying the complexity of MENA politics. To say that Hafez al-Assad was responsible for the spread of suicide bombing is a gross over-simplification. He's also pretty hypocritical in attacking the US for refusing to engage with Machiavellian MENA politics, then criticising them for doing just that when they cut a deal with Libya to pose as the bad guys so they can get Syria as an ally for Gulf War I. Sure it's lies - but it's also realistic. This should have been a lot more interesting because the current Syrian Civil War is a prime example of managed reality and overlaid narratives - after all, this is a conflict in which one side is a nominally secular national-socialist regime, reliant on Twelver fanatics, immigrant mercenaries, drug-dealing terrorists and realist Orthodox nationalists. What fun he could have with the 2011 Sednaya prison releases or Abu Qa'qa.
In this I think he only scratches the surface of the promised Baudrillardian philosophy. I look forward to his next documentary.